Word.ws English Dictionary

pewdom

pewdom noun: the system according to which certain people or certain social classes were allocated particular pews in the local church.

Noun

pewdom (uncountable)

  1. (historical) The system according to which certain people or certain social classes were allocated particular pews in the local church.
    • […] that the people who we say have been driven away, and kept away, from the church by pewdom, do go and build Dissenting meeting-houses. The supporters of these are not the very poor, nor the working classes, […]1879, Authorised Report of the Church Congress, page 113
    • […] and it was from the middle class that this system of pewdom took its rise.1886, The Parliamentary Debates, page 939

Origin of pewdom

From pew + -dom.

Questions about pewdom

What does pewdom mean?
Pewdom means the system according to which certain people or certain social classes were allocated particular pews in the local church.
What part of speech is pewdom?
Pewdom is a noun.

Words near pewdom in the dictionary

  1. pew-openers
  2. pewa
  3. pewage
  4. pewas
  5. pewbs
  6. pewdom
  7. Pewds
  8. pewed
  9. pewee
  10. pewees
  11. pewet

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pewdom (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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